By The Book: Design To Tell

The section By The Book: Design To Tell, invites book designers to share their process of creating art books and catalogs. Each designer invites the next colleague to the magazine.

Who are you?

Avihai Mizrahi, independent designer and artist. Born in Jerusalem. Father of two. Shares a studio in Tel Aviv with my partner Hagit, a fashion designer. Graduated with honors, M.Des in Industrial Design, Bezalel and B. Des. in Visual Communication, Bezalel. Lecturer at various academic institutions for 15 years. A multidisciplinary designer, active in a wide variety of projects and collaborations in the fields of art and culture, and commercial, in Israel and abroad. Also deals with sculpture and object design.

How did you get into the world of design, and book design specifically?

Visual communication is the language I feel most comfortable in, a natural and most appropriate way for me to communicate. I prefer to design and speak through images. Hence, the preference to engage in artistic content and creation by others as raw material. Book design is a significant part of the field of culture and the arts. It provides encounter and dialogue, creation for the sake of creation. This is also why in my design work I make sure to do as many collaborations as possible. For me, the process and the discussion about design are as interesting as the result.

What book design project challenged you most and why?

Each book brings its own challenges. For me, it will always be a positive challenge even if the process is difficult. A catalog I made for the exhibition OverDose, which Neil Nenner (my business partner, industrial designer, artist, and head of the Department of Industrial Design at Shenkar) and I curated and designed at the Holon Design Museum (2022). Most of it is documentation of the exhibition spaces and wandering through them, and browsing through them [in book form] is like the camera zooming in and out, showing the design of the space, and lingering over certain works. The challenge was how to transfer the three-dimensional space into the format of leafing in an interesting way.

A project that led you to unexpected places?

Cover Story, the final project for the Master’s degree in industrial design was a kind of experimentation at the extreme of the discipline’s scale. The project was a collaboration between Neil Nenner and myself (where our studio partnership began), a meeting point between visual communication and industrial design. We asked ourselves whether it is possible to take away a book’s essential qualities in order to tell a new story. Is it possible to separate the archetype of a book, its usability, from the materials it is made of? This led to a series of sculptural objects that examine the material relationships that make up a book, relationships between masses of paper and what binds them—an outcome that at the beginning I never would have imagined we could achieve.

Dream book: an object that can be leafed-through that you haven’t designed yourself and would really like to.

That’s easy, I would love to go through an entire sketchbook by myself without ripping out any of the pages and then eventually throw it away.

Recommendation of a book that you didn’t design?

The Eye Is a Door, an artist’s book by Nitzan Mintz, designed by Avigail Reiner. The book’s excellent editing presents the works in a way that allows for their reading on several levels. The artist’s text works in the urban space have undergone a meticulous typographic design as a book of poetry. A dual experience of powerful documentation and intimate and poetic reading.

An inspiring book—from your bookshelf?

For an inspiring book from my bookshelf, I would choose Purple Magazine, which deals with fashion, culture, art, in a very successful combination of classic and contemporary design, in every aspect—content, typography, layout, and materiality.

Advice for an artist at the beginning of creating a book?

Be attentive and open.

How do you choose a font family for a book project?

Within the framework of the relationship between design and content, choosing fonts or creating them is a response to a need—readability and simplicity or virtuosic creativity. Sometimes there is great design value in the “boring” and the “simple.” Sometimes the typographic expression is another layer or reflection of a message in the form of text and you can let it go wild. The most fun is when there is room for both. It creates an interesting tension in the design.

How do you approach the selection of materials for a book (leafing) project?

The same as choosing fonts. It’s another design element that responds to the content. I have a personal preference for the materiality of wood-free paper, which I experience as the “truth” of paper. When we design objects in the studio that are not books, for example an iron chair, then in most cases the material will be bare, unprocessed and unpainted. But if something else is required for the content, like glossy chromo paper, then of course the potential is limitless.

Designer / Store / Publisher abroad that we can’t miss!

Two designers that I like–Wang Zhihong and Ludovic Balland.

A store that is always fun to visit—Do You Read Me? in Berlin, and Printed Matter in New York.

An interesting project you are currently working on?

I am working with Lee Yanor and the curator Tamara Abramovich on an artist’s book by Yanor, around her video work Come About, which is currently on display at MUZA (Eretz Israel Museum Tel Aviv). She combines works from recent decades—the book is a strong visual experience with rhythm, sound, and pulse [read more about it on Madaf's Instagram Here].

Who should we invite next to the By The Book?

Keren Golan.